Loading binary files into a struct?

[Catthish]

I'm writing a Quake3 model loader in C#. I want to fill a struct with the file header data

Here's a tiny segment of the data :

	struct MD3Header
	{
		public int Ident;
		public int Version;
		public char[] Name;  // 64 chars long
	}

What's the best way of loading this from a file? Currently, I'm doing something like this:

	FileStream fileStream = File.OpenRead(filename);
	BinaryReader file = new BinaryReader(fileStream);
					
	MD3Header md3;
	md3.Ident = file.ReadInt32();
	md3.Version = file.ReadInt32();
	md3.Name = file.ReadChars(64);

Two questions:
Do I have to do it like this, specifying each individual element, or is there some way I can tell it to just stream the entire thing bit-for-bit into the struct?

If I can grab the entire lot in one go, how do I specify that (for instance) the Name element is actally 64 chars long? Given you can't specify array lengths within the struct declaration, it doesn't seem to be possible.

Thanks,
Cat

 

[chiph]

I'm at work, and don't have time to get you the details, but I think what you need to investigate is a ByteArray. I'm pretty sure you can read from a stream into one, and then go from there to a struct via one of the serialization methods.

Chip H.


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